Ceci Moss is the Assistant Curator of Visual Arts at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and an Adjunct Professor at San Francisco Art Institute. She is responsible for coordinating several exhibitions (both solo and group shows) each year, special projects, public art commissions, and public programs for YBCA. Highlights include solo exhibitions by Jacqueline Kiyomi Gordon, Lucy Raven, Nate Boyce, Shana Moulton, and Brenna Murphy, a large scale public art installation by Kota Ezawa in YBCA’s sculpture court, and YBCA’s signature triennial Bay Area Now 7 co-curated with Betti-Sue Hertz. She also co-curated with Astria Suparak the exhibit Alien She that examines the lasting influence of the punk feminist movement Riot Grrrl on contemporary artists, and toured to five venues nationwide.

She has a MA and PhD in Comparative Literature from New York University, and a BA in History and Sociology from U.C. Berkeley. Her academic research addresses contemporary internet-based art practice and network culture. Her PhD dissertation "Expanded Internet Art and the Informational Milieu" examines the expansion of internet art beyond the screen in the 2000’s, especially towards sculpture and installation, as a product of what theorist Tiziana Terranova called an “informational milieu.” Combining art history and media theory through the analysis of case studies that range from internet art and social media in the 2000’s to Jean-François Lyotard’s groundbreaking new media exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in 1985 Les Immatériaux, her dissertation asks how the widespread technological capture of information affects cultural production, specifically contemporary art, and the kind of critical response it necessitates.

Her writing has appeared in Rhizome, Art in America, ArtAsiaPacific, Artforum, The Wire, Performa Magazine, New Media & Society and various art catalogs. Prior to her position at YBCA, she was the Senior Editor of the art and technology non-profit arts organization Rhizome, Special Projects Coordinator for the New Museum/Rhizome and an Adjunct Instructor at New York University in the Department of Comparative Literature. From 2000-2014, she programmed a radio show dedicated to experimental music, Radio Heart, on the independent radio stations KALX, East Village Radio and Radio Valencia.

Over the past year, San Francisco and the Bay Area have come to be defined in the national sphere by the think piece. In the constant stream of articles about gentrification, the Ellis Act evictions, artist displacement, and arts non profits closing left and right in response to the city's rising population and booming tech industry, it might be surprising to note that a number of tech companies are investing increasingly in artist residency programs. In fact, two of the biggest tech companies in the region—Facebook and Autodesk—maintain active residency programs. For companies without the infrastructure for such endeavors, local art and technology non-profit CODAME offers to pair tech companies with artists for individual projects through their "Adopt An Artist" program. While there is a lot of conversation (and concern) in the Bay Area regarding the tech industry's lack of support and philanthropy for the arts, the questions seem skewed towards trying to figure out how to cater to tech wealth, rather than thinking through art's role in the tech industry itself. This text surveys corporate residency programs in the Bay Area which exemplify how artists engage with this industry, and begins to sketch out possible implications—or potential—for the art infrastructure and its relationship with tech creativity.

Autodesk's Pier 9 Artist-in-Residence program is housed in the corporation's immense facility in Pier 9 along the waterfront in downtown San Francisco. Artists apply for four-month residencies at the space, which provides access to their workshop, a stipend, and the ability to work directly with the company's engineers on their projects. The program maintains a diverse pool of applicants who range from fashion designers to chefs, architects, and technologists as well as fine artists, who have access to Autodesk's high-end equipment, materials, and software, plus training and skillshare programs. Although it is not an explicit part of the program, the focus on "makers" over "fine artists" benefits Autodesk as well. The company launched Autodesk 123D in 2009 as free 3D modeling software designed for the general consumer, and they acquired the DIY info sharing website Instructables in 2011. The AIR program began at Instructables before their purchase by Autodesk, who developed it into a much larger initiative. All AIR residents are required to post their projects to the website, so there is a direct tie into the site's content. Envisioning how people create with their tools, or their competitor's tools, in a variety of scenarios is clearly a valuable asset to the company, especially as the mainstream culture moves into a maker culture.

Autodesk Pier 9 Workshop.

Autodesk's Pier 9 AIR Program Manager Vanessa Sigurdson describes the environment at Autodesk as an "office full of artists, not an office with artists" and they aim to have active interchange between the resident artists and engineers. Former resident artists Joseph DeLappe and Adrien Segal felt that the environment was very supportive and encouraging for visiting artists, with an "anything goes" atmosphere. DeLappe created rubber stamps for In Drones We Trust, while Segal used water consumption statistics to build a canyon-like bench. Both mentioned that the workshop helped to foster the company's culture of bustling, creative energy. Sigurdson referenced the Xerox PARC artist-in-residence (PAIR) program as an important inspiration for the residency, a project that similarly brought artists and technologists together in collaboration.

After completing her informal education in Berlin's underground club scene, artist and musician Holly Herndon relocated to the Bay Area to pursue an MFA at Mills College's esteemed music program. Now continuing her studies in computer-based music at Stanford, Herndon has an inquisitive approach to technology, finding common threads among often-divided disciplines and communities: electronic music, academia, the tech sector, and contemporary art. As a result, her work is not easily categorized, whether she's composing music for brass ensembles or working on robotic sculptures with artist Conrad Shawcross, touring festivals in Europe or making dance music with heavily processed recordings of the human voice. This week, she released a 12" entitled Chorus on RVNG Intl.

Ceci Moss: Your new 12" Chorus comes out this week. The title track recalls the experience of continuous partial attention in online browsing, using audio samples derived from your own daily browsing. Chorus begins chaotically, taking form with the addition of percussion. Could you discuss the ideas behind this composition? Also, what did you use to sample your browsing history, and how did you technically create the track?

We are no longer mostly dealing with information that is transmitted form a source to a receiver, but increasingly also with informational dynamics—that is with the relation between noise and signal, including fluctuations and microvariations, entropic emergences and negentropic emergences, positive feedback and chaotic processes. If there is an informational quality to contemporary culture, then it might be not so much because we exchange more information than before, or even because we buy, sell or copy informational commodities, but because cultural processes are taking on the attributes of information—they are increasingly grasped and conceived in terms of their informational dynamics.

- Tiziana Terranova, Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age

Post internet[1], post media [2], post media aesthetics[3], radicant art[4], dispersion[5], formatting[6], meme art[7], circulationism[8]—all recent terms to describe networked art that does not use the internet as its sole platform, but instead as a crucial nexus around which to research, transmit, assemble, and present data, online and offline. I think all of the writers advancing these terms share a sense that since the rise of mainstream internet culture and social media, art is more fluid, elastic, and dispersed. As Lauren Cornell astutely points out in the recent "Post Internet" roundtable for Frieze, terms are always placeholders for more complex ideas, and when successful, can instigate further, deeper conversation. Towards that end, I'd like to introduce another word to the list—expanded. Drawing from the definition of expansion as "the action or process of spreading out or unfolding; the state of being spread out or unfolded," I consider "expansion" not as an outward movement from a fixed entity, but rather, in light of data's dispersed nature, a continual becoming.[9] Expanded internet art is not viewed as hermetic, but instead as a continuously multiple element that exists within a distributed, networked system. In order to elaborate this term, and to take small steps towards thinking through the changing conditions for art production in the early 21st century, I will use Tiziana Terranova's notion of an "informational milieu" to describe the dynamic process of exchange among artist, artwork, and network.

The central theme for this year’s Venice Biennale exhibition, curated by Massimiliano Gioni, comes from an obscure patented design for an encyclopedic palace by the self-taught Italian-American artist Marino Auriti. Envisioned as a 136-story building that would take over sixteen blocks of Washington, D.C., Auriti’s palace was to house all the available knowledge in the world. Titling the show "Il Palazzo Enciclopedico" after Auriti’s unrealized model, Gioni and his team selected an eclectic group of artists, psychologists, mystics and more whose work resonates with Auriti’s desire to create a total image of the world. In many ways, the exhibition can be seen as a response to the exhaustive overabundance of information available on the internet. As Gioni pointedly asks in his essay, "…what is the point of creating an image of the world when the world itself has become increasingly like an image?"

The flâneur is someone abandoned in the crowd. He is thus in the same
situation as the commodity. He is unaware of this special situation,
but this does not diminish its effects on him, it permeates him
blissfully, like a narcotic that can compensate him for many
humiliations. The intoxication to which the flâneur surrenders is the
intoxication of the commodity immersed in a surging stream of
customers. -- Walter Benjamin, 1938

A phantasmagoric journey through mid-20th century Country-Western
music inspired by Walter Benjamin’s "The Paris of the Second Empire in
Baudelaire."

Like the poet as flâneur in Benjamin’s essay, the country singer holds
a position as the susceptible vessel that embodies the incongruities
and ruptures characteristic of modern life. Neither an active symptom
nor proprietor of a solution for the social ills, the singer finds
himself drawn into the intoxicating world of empathetic relations to,
with and as commodity. We hear, perhaps more clearly then in
Baudelaire, a voice speaking not from the elevated position of a
social commentator or critic, but as the desire of the commodity and
commodified. Connoisseurs of narcotics sing empathetic odes to
inanimate objects and intoxicants, fortifying themselves in homes that
are really bars. Hobos, trashmen and ragpickers walk the street
collecting and picking through the worn out, exhausted items that have
escaped our economy of exchange: the antiques of modernity, the images
of obsolescence. The perpetual peregrinator, a rambling man,
heroically stripped of the comforts of modern life finds himself
stalking graveyards and mourning a loss that has yet to occur, the
final refuge of his own death. In a way these songs embody the last
gasp of a failed American politics, the moment before county western
music slips into an emphatic listing of personal property as banal as
Rick Ross’ "Trilla." The tragedy of our era is that the latent
revolutionary desires present in Hank Williams Jr.’s "Fax Me a Beer"
(not included in this mix) are forever doomed to find their outlet in
an inane fantasy of endless technological advancement.